For the past few months, Lodestar had the opportunity to partner with the Wonderful Idea Co. (WICO), a local organization that hosts trainings and develops interactive, hands-on exhibits for makerspaces and museums. With the help of a generous grant from Cognizant, we’ve been able to offer our school as a testing location, where WICO can…
As described in my previous post on the evolution of the Lodestar Lab Makerspace, we have started the introduction of project kits, which are portable tinkering activities that have proved ideal for our site! These kits developed after months of brainstorming and planning – determining appropriate activities, sourcing materials, and testing out the projects. In…
Here at Lodestar, our structure is continually evolving – there are always areas we can improve upon to better serve our students. The Lab makerspace is one of them. Initially, we planned to keep the makerspace inside of the K-3 Learning Lab, with one area devoted to free making, and another to independent kits. However,…
With Lodestar just starting out at its current site, building up functional and quality maker spaces can prove challenging. We want to create spaces where maker-centered learning shines, in which students can lead activities and teachers can facilitate collaboration, co-inspiration, and co-critique. Additionally, we want to model other facets of maker-centered classrooms, which are outlined…
We recently used google street view to take this photo 360° photo of our K-8 Creativity Lab space and then added it to our location on google maps. The great part of this is that others are doing the same and then tweeting their photos to @360makerspaces where we can learn from each other.…
A couple of weeks ago, Kerri Frederick at La Escuelita Elementary asked us for help setting up their Maker Space. They are another school in the Oakland Unified School District that is partnering with Maker Ed’s VISTA program, and had expected to have two VISTAs arriving before the school year started.
These are a relatively new addition to our Creativity Lab, but they’ve been incredibly helpful. We installed these cord reels into our ceilings for easy access to power outlets, without the fuss of tangled extension cords that our students (and teachers!) are likely to trip over. These reels work something like window blinds: when not in…
Bringing Making Into the Classroom!
Our wall of materials gets photographed pretty frequently by visitors who want to know what we keep on-hand for our making, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. We store most of our materials in clear, plastic bins. These are color-coded by general making activity, and age range. Materials like white glue get stored…
The Creativity Lab was featured in EdTech’s Fall 2014 Magazine, the article, Making Sense of Makerspaces: Do-it-yourself ed tech opportunities abound for some schools, can be read here!